Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Putin Won’t Get a New Yalta as West Doesn’t Need Russia to Defeat ISIS, Piontkovsky Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, November 17 – Russian
propagandists and many in the West have been repeating the Kremlin’s mantra
that ISIS cannot be defeated without Moscow’s participation and that in order
to secure Russia’s agreement, it is necessary to overlook Vladimir Putin’s Anschluss
of Crimea and continuing aggression in Ukraine.

The reasons is simple: the two
situations are radically different. “The West could not defeat Hitler without
Stalin just as Stalin could not do so without the West. But the West can deal
independently with ISIS. For that is needed political will,” Piontkovsky says.
And it will be “simpler” to do so if the West isn’t having to make compromises
with Putin and his client Asad.

Since the Paris terrorist attacks,
the analyst says, Russian propaganda has promoted the following line: “Let’s
forget about all our disagreements on Ukraine because before us is a common
mortal enemy which threatens the existence of all of us. We must put aside all
petty matters and unite in the struggle with this enemy.”

This constitutes a renewal of the
effort the Kremlin leader made in his speech to the UN General Assembly in
September “to sell himself as a completely necessary ally of the West for the
struggle with ISIS and to get in return a license to run the post-Soviet space
including Ukraine.”

Kremlin-controlled media have
promoted the idea that Putin made progress in this direction at the G20 summit,
highlighting the fact that the Russian president met with various world leaders
to discuss the fight against Islamist terrorism.But if one looks at what happened, a very
different picture emerges.

Piontkovsky says that “all of Putin’s
dreams about the handing over to him of Ukraine in the context of ‘an
anti-Hitler coalition’ in the same way that Eastern Europe was handed over to
Stalin, were not realized.”US President
Barack Obama made clear that he expects Putin to live up to the Minsk Accords
regarding Ukraine, something that points in a very different direction.

Ukraine certainly can expect that
Moscow will continue to press Kyiv to change its constitutions and decentralize
the country, the Russian analyst says, to which the Ukrainian government should
ask rhetorically whether Moscow thinks French President Hollande should
negotiate with the Islamists “the federalization of France.”

“But the global deal, ‘the new
Yalta,’ Putin will not be able to achieve” – at least as long as Western
leaders recognize how different the situation now is from that in 1941 and show
the political will to take on and defeat ISIS on their own.